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CHAPTER
1
This wasn't the
first time Harry Stimson had looked through the curriculum catalog.
He had gone through it many times since his fifteenth birthday. But
this would be the first time that he would be choosing to take some
of the classes.
“I've had a copy of this catalog for two years. I've dreamed of
signing up for all these classes over and over,” he said.
“You're a real nerd Harry,” said Billy Williams, who was taller
and heavier than Harry.
Their dorm room at Georgia Polytechnic, besides the two beds, had
built-in desks, a few shelves and a separate bathroom. A small fridge
was in the corner.
“Isn't that funny Billy? If I was holding some kind of swimsuit
models calendar, I'd be normal. But because learning is exciting to
me, I'm weird.”
“Yeah, that's right, I don't make the rules,” said Billy.
Harry knew that, but it didn't change the fact that society judged
him, and not kindly. He thought to himself:
The “rules” may have to do with fun or maybe even procreation
of the species but that ain't working out so great, is it?
Indeed, it was obvious to Harry and anyone who cared to notice, that
the population bomb was a dud. Societies all around the globe were
losing populations, even those African countries that were late to
the game of globalization and whose populations continued to
reproduce after other societies had stopped, all were depopulating.
Harry knew what was happening, it made more sense to him than the
news stories that proclaimed everything was fine, just what the
current political party in power wanted them to say. Globalization
was out, regionalization was in, global trade was down, and prices
were up. Economic regions didn't quite have the economies of scale to
match a global economy. But regions had one thing that people would
pay for, security. No longer would a small band of terrorists'
half-way around the world upset the supply chain of a local pharmacy
or grocery.
People saw it with their own eyes; the government was having a harder
and harder time sweeping reality under the rug. Harry didn't even
know why they were trying; except they were scared about what came
next in a shrinking economy. And that was, no one knew what came
next, all economics was based on managing an expanding economy, new
ideas were needed, and government wasn't a fount of new ideas.
Except for a few activists on campus, Harry could put world
conditions to one side during the semester. And he intended to focus
on nothing but his studies, there would be time for the other things
afterward, but he wouldn't get the chance to learn again, it was a
once in a lifetime opportunity.
Most of the others liked Harry, but no one, not even Billy,
understood his determination to learn everything he could in the next
four years. They wanted to do well, but they also wanted to have fun.
That meant that sometimes short shrift to schoolwork might be
necessary in order not to miss out on something, it didn't mean they
were less interested in their studies than Harry, it just meant they
had other interests that were important too. Harry didn't fit in,
even at a school for nerds.
Harry was in his first day of classes. Unlike most freshmen he would
start an advanced math class, calculus, along with his first physics,
a class in Newtonian mechanics. He also was taking a first class in
electrical engineering, Harry expected to get a dual degree. The rest
of his classes didn't really interest him, being in English, history,
and social studies. But Harry was determined to do as well in them as
in his math and physics classes.
After class he was talking to Billy in their room as they ate the
pizza they had ordered. Harry was carrying on about the calculus and
mechanics textbooks.
“Harry, I know you are crazy about these subjects but to me they
are just requirements for my degree.”
“You know Billy, I understand people can have no interest in these
subjects, but I think that by now, in this society, people would be
happy that there are some like me that do. You can't run a high-tech
society on magic.”
“I guess that many people don't care for a high-tech society Harry.
They are more interested in other people than in calculus.”
“They might not care about high tech,” said Harry, “but if it
disappears they will. This society would devolve rather quickly
without the nerds that keep the technology going and make the
scientific discoveries.”
“That's true Harry but who cares. Most people figure that someone
will be interested in doing the job at some price.”
“And yet, they resent that person's success, especially if it
results in a windfall. It happens every time. Some guy works his tail
off developing a technology, succeeds and is rewarded monetarily, and
then is vilified for becoming rich.”
“Jealousy, Harry. It's as old as humanity.”
“May be Billy, but these primal traits aren't attuned to a modern
society in which one man can bring wealth to many. As a matter of
fact, a modern society is attuned to just such circumstance. Without
these individuals, who in pursuing their own interests provide a
bounty that others share, we would see a terrible crash.”
“You think without these successful millionaires and billionaires,
society as it is configured would cease?”
“It's like a rock tumbling down a mountainside,” said Harry, “it
shakes loose more and more until a great momentum of, in this case,
wealth is created. Without that landslide nothing's created.”
“Or that landslide could destroy anything it hits,” said Billy.
“Except that's not the way it works Billy, that's not the way it
has ever worked. Just look at the billionaires who opened up space.”
“Well, yeah it's cool that people are on the Moon and that we've
been to Mars but so far as I can tell it's not had much impact here
on Earth,” said Billy.
“That's like saying the voyages to the New World had no effect on
world history. There hasn't been enough time Billy, they're building
the infrastructure and at some point, the effects will be more than
apparent.”
“Well, when they're apparent, I guess people will be more
supportive. Once it affects their day to day.”
Harry ended that year with a four-zero grade point average, Billy
finished with a two-eight, but Billy did see all the home and away
football games. Harry continued to pull ahead of Billy in classes
completed until the first semester of their third year, Harry found
himself with just three classes left for his degree, Billy faced
another full two years. They no longer roomed together and rarely saw
each other.
With just a few classes that semester, Harry had enough time to take
on another project. He found a position in one of the physics labs.
The head of the lab, Maxwell Zee was studying spacetime bubbles.
Harry didn't understand exactly what that meant until he had an
opportunity to read some of Dr. Zee's papers.
According to the papers, a bubble in spacetime was one of a number of
topological entities allowed by general relativity. In this case it
was like a void around which spacetime would swirl. In spacetime, the
bubble's movement could be influenced by the way in which it warped.
In effect, the warped bubble would setup a tension with spacetime and
to relieve that tension, it would “squirt” away like an air
bubble in water.
If Zee's hypothesis was correct, then anything inside the bubble
would be carried along with the bubble's motion, with the object
experiencing no inertial effects since it was still with respect to
the spacetime void. It was an interesting conjecture and as far as
Harry could tell, the math supported the conclusion, but the proof of
spacetime bubbles would have to come experimentally. And that was
going to be difficult.
After discussing the work with Dr. Zee, Harry found himself assigned
the task of detecting the bubble and its motion. Dr. Zee would be
responsible for causing the bubble to form and move. He offered Harry
a few ideas on how to detect the bubble but the details of
implementing those ideas would be left up to Harry. Harry was a bit
daunted, he had little support, no help, and not enough training, but
he also had nothing to lose, so he would try.
Harry spent most of his afternoons that semester in the lab which was
equipped with state-of-the-art electronics. He spent a good deal of
time learning to operate that equipment. He spent the evenings in the
old room he used to share with Billy thinking about spacetime bubbles
and how they would affect their surroundings.
He knew that Dr. Zee expected these first bubbles to be extremely
small. The size of the bubble scaled as the energy used to create it
and Zee didn't want to use too much energy in a building on campus
close to others. But the small size would make detecting the bubble
harder.
The only hint that Zee had given him was that the bubble should leave
a “wake” of displaced spacetime spreading out around it as it
accelerated through curved spacetime, such as did Earth's
gravitational field. Zee was a gifted theorist and experimentalist,
but his explanations were somewhat lacking. He expected the math to
do his talking.
Although Dr. Zee had tried to explain his theory to Harry, mostly
using math of course, Harry couldn't completely follow the
professor's arguments since he hadn't had the math or physics
necessary, that wouldn't come until graduate school. But Dr. Zee had
explained that his method was to change the Hubble constant locally.
Harry knew that the Hubble constant was related to the expansion of
space itself. And he had found that at its present global value, one
meter of space would expand to two meters of space if someone were to
wait sixty-five billion years, a very slow warp drive.
Zee had also explained that to locally expand space at the speed of
light, the Hubble factor (he had almost stopped calling it a
constant) would need to be increased by a factor of ten to the
twenty-six, a huge number. Not only that, but Zee's idea of how to
increase the Hubble factor was based on the as yet unproven theories
of extra dimensions.
According to these theories the gravity fields (actually graviton
fields in the theories) of the extra dimensions could contribute to
the energy associated with the Hubble constant. Meaning that the
compactified or rolled-up spatial dimensions could affect the
expansion rate of noncompact space. Indeed, general relativity itself
showed that by changing the radius of the rolled-up dimensions,
expansion of normal space should follow. Further calculations done by
Dr. Zee showed that the radius of the compactified dimension would
need to be changed by a factor of ten to the thirteenth to cause
space to expand at the speed of light.
Dr. Zee wouldn't try to have the tiny bubble he hoped to create reach
anywhere near that speed during the early experiments. He would
settle for subluminal speeds.
To affect the rolled-up dimension he would shine a laser on a black
box target in an effort to focus enough energy in a small enough
space to hopefully change the radius of the rolled-up dimensions. He
expected three of the dimensions to be affected because of
three-dimensional space, but more dimensions could follow, creating a
hyper-void. It didn't seem to matter which compacted dimensions were
affected, just that the energy provided by the laser could change the
radius of those dimensions.
The lack of a deep understanding of Zee's math was a problem for
Harry, but he found a solution in an unlikely place. First, because
Zee expected the gravity waves during the acceleration and
deceleration phase of the bubble, Harry would focus on detecting
those emissions. Second, because the usual detection of gravity waves
was done by interferometric means and this meant a large and
expensive detector, he had to come up with something else. He found a
possibility in an old but discredited gravity wave detection scheme,
a Weber bar antenna.
Weber, also an engineer and physicist, had used solid metal bars to
try to detect gravity waves. Weber's original “bar” was a large
aluminum cylinder two meters long and half a meter in diameter. A
gravity wave traveling perpendicular to the cylinder's axis would
produce tidal forces that stretched and contracted the cylinder's
length. If the gravity wave frequency was close to the resonant
frequency of the bar, the change in length would be detectable. Weber
used piezoelectric crystals attached to the bar to detect this change
and generate an electrical signal.
Some of the Weber bars were as unwieldy as a giant interferometer
since they weighed up to five tons. And no Weber bar had conclusively
found a gravitational wave, as had a lightwave interferometer. But
Harry had an idea for increasing the sensitivity of such a detector
while decreasing its size.
A chamber of superfluid helium-4 would respond at acoustic
frequencies to the passage of gravity waves. To get the information
out of the chamber Harry could couple the acoustic waves to a
resonant microwave circuit. Even though the coupling between the
motion of the helium and the microwave field would be relatively
weak, Harry thought he could dig it out with some properly designed
electronics and maybe some data processing.
Such a system could be small and still have a better sensitivity than
existing interferometers or Weber bars. As he worked through the
calculations, he realized the excellent sensitivity could only be
obtained around the narrow band of the detector's acoustic resonance.
In other words, the detector could only detect a narrow range of
frequencies. But Harry could eventually tune the frequencies the
detector was sensitive to by pressurizing and therefore modifying the
speed of sound in the helium.
He
worked up a presentation and gave it to Dr. Zee. Dr. Zee looked it
over without comment and scheduled Harry to give his presentation at
the monthly physics colloquium that the department held. Harry was
nervous but agreed.
CHAPTER 2
